Introduction to Orwell Audio Clip

When Orwell returned to England after his stint in the Spanish war, it became known in political circles that he was writing a book (eventually Homage To Catalonia) about his experiences there. The Communist Party in England put it out that Orwell had once written that working class people "smell," in an effort to smear and discredit him in advance of the release of his book, which was going to be VERY critical of the Communist role in Spain. Of course he had never written any such thing. He had written that many in the middle class are brought up to believe the lower classes smelled.

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The late Frederick Davidson was one of the high priests of recorded book narrators. He narrated Michael Shelden's Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) for audible.com.

Elsewhere on this site is a one thousand word extract from an essay -- Looking Back On The Spanish War -- written by Orwell in 1942; I titled the extract Orwell On Fact and Reality. As an aid in understanding Orwell's visceral involvement in these issues, I make available a seven minute audio extract from Shelden's biography.